Great days of teaching

I have had a few great teaching moments in the past week. Last year, a few of the students in that class got to the library very early. While I was setting up, one girl complained, "Why do we have to do this again? I've been here so many times already!" I ran through the useful resources for the assignment, asking them to explain some of the stuff. There were many questions they couldn't answer. I talked about relevant reference books, but when they broke off to do their lab assignment on creating a profile for a neurological disease, they went straight to Web sites.... and they got very frustrated. Finally I convinced one of them to try the Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine, and there was a moment of light shining down as they got it. They were recommending it to the other groups, and I watched those heavenly spotlights shine down.

This year I told the students how much previous students liked that resource, so many of them went straight to it. They loved it even more. One group had to be told to go use some electronic resources because they were so involved in the print encyclopedia. It was wonderful. It was like having a celebrity endorsement.

Today I taught two English composition courses. We did the spy game and it went very well. For the first time, I coupled the game with a clicker review at the end. Almost the entire class got every single question right, and a majority of them reported that this was a fun way to learn about the library.

Furthermore, one student that I had worked with one-on-one the previous week, came up to tell me how much she had learned about the library from our meeting. She was raving about the resources and the elevator. She seemed very excited about her topic and research, which absolutely thrilled me.